How to download a file with curl

Give it a try:. You can combine the -L argument with some of the aforementioned arguments to download the file to your local system:. Warning : Many resources online will ask you to use curl to download scripts and execute them.

You can learn more by viewing the manual page for curl by running man curl. Where would you like to share this to? Twitter Reddit Hacker News Facebook. Share link Tutorial share link. Sign Up. If the requested file requires basic authentication, you need to use the -u option followed by the credential which is in the form of user:password :. To read more about basic authentication, you can read the article 3 methods to use basic authentication with cURL. To see more examples, you can read the article How to use a proxy with cURL.

If you do not want cURL to show the progress meter or error messages, you can use the -s or --silent option:. Get feral when you answer to the greatest interview in history Share your philosophy. If we use curl -L -O www.

You can see that there are two rows in our download table that didn't download any data. These are the URLs that were redirected. We can review this redirect chain with:. Don't have a Linux machine? If you'd like the file to have a different file name perhaps readme is too bossy for you , specify it after -O : curl -o dontreadme. In fact, --output can be shortened to -o. Now watch out: the number of hyphens is not something you can mess up on; the following commands would cause an error or other unexpected behavior:.

Also, mind the position of my. The argument must follow after the -o …because curl. How would curl know that my. In fact, you might see that you've created a file named -s …which is not the end of the world, but not something you want to happen unwittingly. By and large from what I can think of at the top of my head , the order of the options doesn't matter:. That's because the -s option doesn't take an argument. But try the following:. The last thing to consider is what happens when you just curl for a URL with no options which, after all, should be optional.

Before you try it, think about another part of the Unix philosophy :. This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well.